Comments – make large margin when printing (Word 2002)

Topic

New Reply

Hi there

I have a document created in Word 97 opened in Office 2002. Gone are the yellow highlights – replaced by dotted lines connecting to a balloon in the right margin. While I have no problem with the view on screen, when I print the document the text is shoved to the left leaving a ridiculous large margin on the right where the comments would be.

Is there away to fix this for printing?

Kerry

Reply | Quote

Replies

I don’t know if this is going to be a common problem or only once off, but if you want to print a document without comments, activate the reviewing toolbar and click the Show button. From the sub menu deactivate comments. Then print!
Hope this helps for a once off. If its a frequent feature you could automate the actions with a macro!

Reply | Quote

This is a known glitch with balloons and comments in Word 2002. In Word 2002 if you:
1. Turn on the Reviewing toolbar
2. Click the Show button then Options
3. Check the box to use Balloons in Web and Print Layout View
3. Reduce the preferred width to 0
4. Turn off the Balloons

Does that eliminate your wide right margin?

Reply | Quote

Well………yes that works but what is with this version of Word!! Someone at Microsoft must have been on something when they developed this version. It is dreadful!

All the user now sees is tiny red brackets around commented text. Easily missed! And what is with the date, and time the comment was made. Surely this can be turned off.

Kerry

Reply | Quote

Hi Kerry:
There is a recent thread about tracked changes & date & author that you can search for. Also, Woody has several articles about modifying tracked changes in Word 2002. See:
http://www.woodyswatch.com/wowmm/archtemplate.asp?v3-n02%5B/url%5D http://www.woodyswatch.com/wowmm/archtemplate.asp?v3-n03%5B/url%5D http://www.woodyswatch.com/wowmm/archtemplate.asp?v3-n04%5B/url%5D http://www.woodyswatch.com/wowmm/archtemplate.asp?v3-n05%5B/url%5D http://www.woodyswatch.com/office/archtemplate.asp?v8-n12%5B/url%5D http://www.woodyswatch.com/office/archtemplate.asp?v9-n13%5B/url%5D & http://www.woodyswatch.com/office/archtemplate.asp?v7-n19%5B/url%5D.
Cheers,

Added: the post I referred to is here.

Reply | Quote

Thankyou for all the background info Phil. It is starting to make me rethink the way I have been using the comment feature. Perhaps I should be doing something else.

I dont actually use comments for editing of tracking changes. I use comments for describing in more detail the informtion required in a form field. In Word 97 the yellow highlighting was an indicator to see that there was a comment to read for instructions. I know I could use the help menu on the form field, but there is no indicator that there is help available. ( ie yellow highlighting)

Is there any other way to do this?

Kerry

Reply | Quote

Hi Kerry:
For some reason, I thought your original question was about tracked changes, not comments (I think it was the balloons that threw me ). Now I see what you’re talking about. Unfortunately, I don’t have Word 2002 to test. In Word 2000, there was an option,Tools/Options/View tab/Screen tips, that had to be checked for the highlight to work. Is that option gone in 2002?

Reply | Quote

Hi Kerry

I don’t know if it would suit your specific purpose, but you could try “jamming” a footnote right up against the field. When the mouse pointer is over the field, the footnote text will then appear in a popup window. Alternatively, using endnotes might give you the added control desired when printing the form (with or without the endnote “help text”).

Alan

Edited – see attachment for “rough” example.

Reply | Quote

Good thought Alan, but unfortunately that leaves me with a page of footnotes at the end of the document that I dont want.

Kerry

Reply | Quote

I see it works better in the 2003 version. If you switch off the use of comment bubbles in the track changes dialog, and insert comments, it works just like the 2000 version, where it highlights the text and activates a pop-up message if the mouse hovers over the comment. This of course is not functional in 2002. As you mentioned, it only puts red brackets around the text!
[indent]

---

Someone at Microsoft must have been on something when they developed this version. It is dreadful!

---

[/indent]
They seem to have corrected their mistake in the 2003 version!!! There is some hope after-all!

Reply | Quote

For 2002 this seems to be the best option. I guess I can tolerate the red brackets, but the excessive details about the comments are a pain. The person viewing my comments doesnt need to know the time I made the comment.

I suppose it really comes down to the purpose one uses the comments for. I use them to give the user of my document background information about what is required. This is porbably not what “comments” was created for.

See example attached.

Reply | Quote

Comments are primarily intended for collaborative reviewing and editing of a document, but they can be used for whatever purpose you like.

As an alternative, you can add two kinds of help text to form fields: a text to be displayed in Word’s status bar when the user activates the form field, and a help text to be displayed when the user presses F1 while in a form field. See the attached version (since there is only one form field in the document, you must click in it or press Tab to see the status bar help text).

Reply | Quote

I agree with Hans. I think what you’re looking to use is the Help text that you can add to form fields not comments.

Reply | Quote

[indent]

---

a text to be displayed in Word’s status bar when the user activates the form field

---

[/indent] I was using that a lot a while ago, but despite telling the users this over and over again, they didn’t take notice. Asking them why, they always complained that it’s not catching the eye that there’s a message in the status bar. So I stopped using this method. But if you know of a way to make it more eye-catching then I would give it another shot…

Alternatively, on occasion I give the user a hint what to do, by adding some hidden text. (When Word starts up, the show hidden text option is programmatically ticked and printing hidden text is turned off.) Example from a letter ([….] is a FormField ):

Subject: […..] Max. 3 lines.

Sometimes there’s room for a longer instructional text on a blank line between 2 paragraphs. (I know, I know, I should set the extra space in the style instead of using blank lines. But this suits me perfectly for the purpose!)

Reply | Quote

(Edited by kerryg on 21-Oct-04 20:36. )

Hans I think you are onto something here!! Only trouble will be to educate the users that there is in fact HELP. They are so used to being alerted to the ‘prompt text’ by the yellow shading of the preceeding text. You know the “old dogs” story………

Kerry

PS (Edited) It appears there is a limit of 255 characters. This will mean some serious editing of help text!!

Reply | Quote

You can apply the yellow shading manually. I once wrote a macro to do that because I couldn’t see the comments when I first switched to Word 2002.

Reply | Quote

Have you still got that Macro?

If it is shaded manually, wouldnt that shading show up when the document is printed?

Reply | Quote

> If it is shaded manually, wouldnt that shading show up when the document is printed?

Yes. Maybe that’s why I don’t use that macro. (It probably is posted around here somewhere; I don’t know if I could find it on my system.)

Reply | Quote

Kerry

When comments or tracked changes are present, the default printing dialog says you want to print this showing the balloons. Make sure you change the field in the print dialog called “Print what” to say ‘Document’ and not ‘Document with Markup’

Reply | Quote

While that does work Andrew, the user has to make that selection from the Print Menu.

The users would not know to do that and there are too many to teach.

Thanks anyway.

Reply | Quote